The daughter of one of my patients shared a story with me about a previous visit their family had at the hospital I work at. Everything I share in this story is what she personally told me:
They had been in the hospital at that time for a few weeks when they had been expecting to stay only for a few days. Her mother had been very sick and was so sick, in fact, that she was near death and began talking to her dead relatives as though they were close at hand (which, if you understand that we are surrounded by the Cloud of Witnesses, she most likely was close to death and was talking to her deceased family.)
She was given a room in the ICU, so a nurse came to move this patient to the new room. The person who came to the room to move her was a tall blond male nurse with piercing blue eyes with beautiful tattoos of wings on each of his arms. When he came into the room he told them, “You are safe now because I’m here to take care of you.” This nurse took them to the ICU, got her tucked in bed, gave her medications, and told both the patient and her daughter to rest.
They were undisturbed for six hours overnight and got amazing sleep, then woke up the next morning, the patient went to a surgical procedure, and had recovered so well that she discharged from the hospital the next day.
When the daughter talked to staff about the nurse they had that night, she was very thankful for his care and wanted to know who it was—but the hospital had to record of this employee and none of the staff recognized any ICU nurse matching that description. Because she had been given medications, had vital signs taken, etc., all of that should be recorded electronically on the Electronic Health Record, so they decided to speak with Medical Records to get a copy of their records for that hospital stay. Per the daughter, this “employee” did not appear anywhere in the medical records as well—as if this nurse who worked with them overnight basically didn’t exist!
The daughter was excited when she told me this story, and she told me it was the reason they came back to the hospital when I met them—because they knew beyond a shadow of doubt that angels were actively at work in the building and it gave them a feeling of security knowing that God was taking care of them.
The Bible tells us in Hebrews 13:2, “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.” There is something about how angels function that, at times, they will manifest in bodily form appearing as humans, and we can interact with them without knowing we are talking to angels. I firmly believe this is exactly what happened in this encounter they had!
To add some details to consider, any time someone transfers from one unit to another in this hospital, there is a process. The bed on the new unit has to be assigned and someone has to transfer them in the computer once they arrive—which means someone has to either tell the person to transfer them in the computer, or do it themselves. This means the angel would have either had to do the electronic transfer himself or tell someone else to—someone who later clearly didn’t remember that conversation with that being. When a patient transfers units, the offgoing nurse gives a report to the oncoming nurse, so someone would have had to tell the angel something about the patient they were coming to pick up, and if they didn’t do that, the offgoing nurse would have followed up at some point to ensure that report was given if for no other reason than it is a legal obligation nurses have when transferring care. All documentation in the computer would require some kind of login, and somehow every nurse on the unit would have to have believed that some other nurse was the one caring for that patient including the Charge Nurse who is the one responsible for making staff assignments. Furthermore, if the Charge RN didn’t initially notice that overnight the patient had no nurse assigned, they would certainly have noticed when it came time to make assignments for the day shift staff.
All of these details and more make this story just that much more profound when we consider all of the big and little details that God had to work out in order to send an angel to take care of his beloved daughter and to ensure she recovered and was able to return to her normal life. In the same way that God went out of His way for her, God cares about all of the big and little things in all of our lives, and when we pray and ask Him to intervene, we can trust that He will. Whether it will always be as dramatic as this encounter or not, we have a Heavenly Father who is trustworthy—and who knows! Maybe someday you will be telling me a story of an angelic encounter you had as well!
